Twentieth-century American Literature Research Articles

Modeling Therapy as Discourse in Twentieth-Century American Literature

Abstract This article uses quantitative methods of cultural analytics in order to trace points of contact between the discourse of therapy as it emerges in the encounter between patient and clinician and in the language of twentieth-century US novels. Our computational analysis moves away from considering therapy as a diagnostic tool, either for characters or authors, and towards thinking about therapy as a discourse: a set of words (semantics) in a pattern of proportions (parts of speech, grammar). Our computational models identify excerpts of novels that contain therapy discourse and, in so doing, reveal the ways that the discourse of therapy exists in the novel beyond its expected pathways of entry (through setting, plot, and characterization). In close reading these excerpts, we observe the consistent use of a representational aesthetics of psychological interiority, one that endeavors to approximate a realistic experience of living in and through our interactions with one another. We propose that therapy as a discourse is not strictly a clinical endeavor but is more broadly an intersubjective enterprise—a process-oriented linguistic phenomenon that arises in a more heterogeneous canon of novels than those in which critics have traditionally thought to look. Using cultural analytical methods to explore therapy as a discourse helps us . . . to consider therapy and the novel as interdependent terms of analysis and at heretofore impossible scales.

THE IMAGE OF “AN ORDINARY AMERICAN” IN J. UPDIKE’S SHORT STORIES

The article is devoted to the study of the short story genre in the context of the second half of the twentieth century American literature, an attempt is made to show the way of the genre from the form of standard story to so called “psychological sketch”. The short story manifested the national originality of American prose, the peculiarities of the national character and local color earlier and more fully than other forms. It developed the traditions of folk stories, folk humor, and satire. The object of analysis is J. Updike’s short story "Pigeon Feathers", that is concentrated on the middle class problems of American society and the “ordinary Americans”. Updike became an innovator in the short story genre, embodying the best ideas of his predecessors and developing his own ideas of genre diversity. According to both national and American critics, the main stylistic feature of Updike's short story collections is the close connection between them, most of them continuing each other, leaving behind a through plot and a single emotional experience.

In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic UnseenWhat Was Literary Impressionism?

Book Review| April 28 2023 In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic UnseenWhat Was Literary Impressionism? In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen. By Alix Beeston. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. 2018. xvi, 256 pp. Cloth, $78.00.What Was Literary Impressionism? By Michael Fried. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press. 2018. viii, 400 pp. Cloth, $46.50. David Tomkins David Tomkins David Tomkins is professor (teaching) of writing at the University of Southern California. His current book project, “Practicing Assemblage,” draws on Deleuzian philosophy and post-process composition scholarship to devise new approaches to teaching advanced writing. He has also written on power dynamics, empathy, and performativity in writing classrooms; science fiction; and early twentieth-century American literature. In 2020 he co-organized the CCCC Regional Conference “Building Diverse Communities through Writing” held at the University of Southern California. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature 10679279. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-10679279 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation David Tomkins; In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic UnseenWhat Was Literary Impressionism?. American Literature 2023; 10679279. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-10679279 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2023 by Duke University Press2023 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Cognitive Mapping and Thirdspace in Spatial Literary Pedagogy

Abstract This piece is a reflection on spatiality as critical approach in the classroom. The article focuses on a seminar taught during spring 2019, in which cognitive mapping and thirdspace were used as tools to analyze twentieth-century American literature. Through the elaboration of thirdspace provided by Edward Soja in his seminal work Thirdspace: Journeys through Los Angeles and Other Real and Imagined Places and Fredric Jameson's definition of cognitive mapping found in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, this study offers examples of how literary cartography can be used as a tool in the classroom to reflect on the social and historical conditions that informed specific literary narratives.

PSA Honorary Member: Susan Elizabeth Sweeney

Susan Elizabeth Sweeney is a distinguished scholar, teacher, and creative writer who has contributed significantly to Poe studies worldwide through her presentations, publications, and service to the Poe Studies Association over the course of her productive career. Beth’s research and teaching interests are wide ranging—including detective fiction, Edgar Allan Poe, Vladimir Nabokov, Edith Wharton, Anne Tyler, feminist narratology, local writing, and poetry.Beth first studied Poe in the context of postmodernist “metaphysical” detective stories. Most of her work on detective fiction, including even an essay on Barbara Wilson’s lesbian detective novel Gaudi Afternoon, and some of her work on Nabokov (another major area of study) incorporate Poe. At some point, after chairing a session at the first international Poe conference and beginning to offer a regular seminar on “Poe’s Haunted World,” Beth became utterly absorbed in his work beyond the detective genre. Her training at Mount Holyoke and Brown University is mostly in twentieth-century American and European literature, but delving into Poe involved immersing herself in his world, so she found herself exploring nineteenth-century phenomena such as natural science, artificial light, optical devices, early photography, public speaking, and ventriloquism as contexts for his work. Coming to Poe “in a backwards fashion,” as she recounted in a Zoom seminar last year, allowed her to be playful and experimental, which resulted in her writing a screenplay based on his courtship of Sarah Helen Whitman and sculpting books out of clay representing the experiences of reading “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Black Cat.” As she wrote to me about her feelings toward the PSA, “I was welcomed by the PSA, and I have met wonderful friends and colleagues” while serving in various leadership roles and participating in many of the PSA’s activities over the years.In addition to the recognition she has received from the PSA for her outstanding research (the Gargano Award for an essay on Poe published in 2018 and in 2020 for a chapter published in a volume that won the Dameron Award), she has contributed significantly to our association by serving as PSA vice president, president, and immediate past president (2007–13), an editorial board member of the Edgar Allan Poe Review, and a member of three international conference program committees, the Gargano and Dameron Award committees, and, most recently, chair of the PSA nominating committee (on which she had served previously as a member). Beyond the PSA, Beth has volunteered her time and expertise to judge the Saturday “Visiter” Awards at the 2022 Poe Fest International. Many of us recall and appreciate seeing or acting in her screenplay about Poe’s romance with Sarah Helen Whitman at the Positively Poe Conference in Charlottesville, Virginia. These contributions, as well as her participation as a speaker and a chair at the PSA’s major conferences as well as at PSA-sponsored sessions at the Modern Language Association and the American Literature Association, illustrate her longtime engagement with and advancement of Poe studies.For her important contributions to Poe studies and her advancement of the mission of our organization, the Poe Studies Association recognizes Susan Elizabeth Sweeney with PSA honorary membership, which includes lifetime dues, a commemorative plaque, and the well-earned admiration of her peers. I look forward to the opportunity to present this award to Beth, if possible, at the 2023 ALA Convention in Boston.

The Green Depression: American Ecoliterature in the 1930s and 1940s by Matthew M. Lambert

<i>The Green Depression: American Ecoliterature in the 1930s and 1940s</i> by Matthew M. Lambert

The Image of Childhood in Pop Culture (Childhood in Crisis)

This article will focus on the importance of educational values instilled in teenage characters of the Twentieth and Twenty-first century English and American Literature. Education is a fundamental part of intellectual freedom and one of its main values is enhancing how children view, exist in, and participate in the world (Rothwell, 2013). The scope of what follows is to examine the image of childhood in popular culture, comparing two great novels, Lord of the Flies by William Golding and The Hunger Games written by American novelist Suzanne Collins. In both novels, children tend to get into various crises, as evidenced by contrasting images. It is here where the survival instinct becomes dominant and children lose their childhood together with their innocence.

Re-thinking and Re-making Kinship—a Critical Reevaluation of the Narratives of (American) Modernity: An Interview with Nancy Bentley

Nancy Bentley is a distinguished scholar of American literary and cultural studies. She received her PhD from Harvard University where she specialized in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature and culture. Her work, including the monographs Frantic Panoramas: American Literature and Mass Culture 1870-1920 and The Ethnography of Manners, has combined disciplinary perspectives in original ways, in particular law and literature, anthropology and literature. Her other research inte...

Contributors’ Notes

Contributors’ Notes

When Pushkin's Blackness Was in Vogue: Rediscovering the Racialization of Russia's Preeminent Poet and His Descendants

This essay investigates interconnections between the novelist, Henry James, Ivan Turgenev, and Aleksandr Pushkin and identifies the racial subtext of these associations. Several scholars have connected Pushkin and James. But none of this scholarship has speculated on whether it was the poet's African heritage that was at the root of hidden connections between these authors. Moreover, though most scholarship on Pushkin's reception in the United States focuses on twentieth-century African American literature, his African heritage was publicized much earlier. In fact, nineteenth-century commentators on both sides of the Atlantic frequently discussed Pushkin's racial heritage as a canonical European writer of African descent. This essay recovers how Henry James used Pushkin's daughter, the morganatic Countess Merenberg, as a model for the racially ambiguous “morganatic” Baroness Münster in The Europeans (1878). A decade later, James seems to have invoked the Countess Merenberg once more in his rewriting of Pushkin's “The Queen of Spades” (1833) in The Aspern Papers (1888). While James publicly attributed Byron and Shelley as inspirations, the discourse surrounding the African heritage of Pushkin and his heirs helps explain why the novelist minimized and erased the racial lineage at the center of The Europeans and The Aspern Papers.

The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery: The Chinese Worker and the Minstrel Form by Caroline H. Yang

Reviewed by: The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery: The Chinese Worker and the Minstrel Form by Caroline H. Yang Klara Loc-Ling Boger (bio) The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery: The Chinese Worker and the Minstrel Form, by Caroline H. Yang. Stanford University Press, 2020. Ix + 280 pp. $28.00 paper. ISBN 9781503612051. Explicitly evoking Saidiya Hartman's articulation of "the afterlives of slavery," Caroline H. Yang's The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery: The Chinese Worker and the Minstrel Form compellingly argues that one such afterlife, the minstrel form, informed representations of Chinese "coolie" labor in late nineteenth and early twentieth century American literature. Yang emphasizes minstrelsy's origins in American chattel slavery and its antiblack logics that resulted in jovial depictions of enslaved Black people as "naturally" subservient to whites. Minstrelsy's specifically proslavery antiblackness affirmed whiteness as the only legitimate claim to personhood and citizenship even after Emancipation, and as the nation expanded westward, this sense of white national identity had to contend with other subordinated racialized labors. Coolie labor, at once seen as a replacement for slave labor and as a challenge to the standard of "free" American labor, perpetuated white anxieties about who can claim "legitimate" labor and citizenship. Using Robin Bernstein's definition of repertoire as a set of practices and gestures that inform everyday life, Yang asserts that blackface minstrelsy was one such repertoire that formed a "state of vision, of feeling, and of consciousness" in nineteenth century America (37). Yang's turn to the minstrel form's manifestation in literature after Emancipation is significant as she demonstrates the ways pervasive and quotidian antiblackness set the terms of representation for the Chinese "coolie" laborer. Literary minstrelsy during Reconstruction was a venue for the forging of a national cultural identity that upheld white supremacist definitions of personhood and political enfranchisement, "recalibrating" antiblack racism through the coolie figure (19). "Coolie" minstrelsy continued proslavery logics through representations of nonwhite figures as subhuman as it attended to anxieties about racialized labor that was nonwhite yet also not enslaved. In "Part I: 'Earliest Pioneers' of White Literature of the West During Reconstruction," Yang explores work by white writers, namely Bret Harte, Mark Twain, and Ambrose Bierce, who, in spite of their "progressive" politics, still perpetuated racist depictions of Chinese laborers by deploying popular minstrel tropes and gestures. Thus, these writers intertwined the antiblack logics of slavery with US imperialism. These writers began their literary careers in California and were central in crafting or "pioneering" the space of the West as an American national space. For example, Yang argues that Harte's best-selling 1870 poem "Plain Language from Truthful James," later renamed "Heathen Chinee," refigures Topsy from Uncle Tom's Cabin, a character that employs minstrel gestures, into the language and gestures of the Chinese laborer Ah Sin. Twain's early [End Page 510] representations of the Chinese, such as in the play Ah Sin (1877) co-written with Harte, demonstrates his appreciation for minstrel shows; in many of his early writings that feature Chinese people, Twain directly borrows from minstrelsy and employs a mixture of the stock characters the "interlocutor," a straight man character, and "end men," two joke-telling characters nicknamed Tambo and Bones. Bierce's representation of the Chinese in his early short story "The Haunted Valley" (1871) at first glance seems to be most critical of minstrelsy, yet ultimately fails to point to the form's origins in slavery. The westward extension of a minstrelsy cognizant of Chinese labor was a crucial mechanism that made the "external" space of the frontier internal to the nation. Yang's readings of these texts importantly underscore slavery, colonization, and imperialism's intertwined relationship. In "Part II: 'Pioneers' of Asian American and African American Literatures at the Turn of the Twentieth Century," Yang examines how "Eurasian" writer Sui Sin Far and African American writer Charles Chesnutt offer critiques of minstrelsy. Whereas the aforementioned white writers were "pioneers" of the colonial space of the West during Reconstruction, Far and Chesnutt wrote after Reconstruction and can be seen as "pioneers" of their respective minority American literary traditions. Still, Yang argues, Far fails in her critique to acknowledge minstrelsy's roots in slavery, such...

Naturalism’s International Identity: Anti-Semitism, Alienation, and Women’s Writing

Research Article| November 01 2020 Naturalism’s International Identity: Anti-Semitism, Alienation, and Women’s Writing Cara Erdheim Kilgallen Cara Erdheim Kilgallen Sacred Heart University, Fairfield, Connecticut Cara Erdheim Kilgallen is an Associate Professor of English and Chair of the Languages and Literatures Department at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut. Her teaching and scholarship interests range from disability narratives and sports stories to environmental literature and food writing. Her research focuses on early twentieth-century American literature, particularly literary naturalism and Progressive-Era writing. She has published peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and Richard Wright. Jewish American literature has become a recent research and scholarly interest, which she looks forward to sharing through this contributed piece. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google CR: The New Centennial Review (2020) 20 (3): 153–178. https://doi.org/10.14321/crnewcentrevi.20.3.0153 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Cara Erdheim Kilgallen; Naturalism’s International Identity: Anti-Semitism, Alienation, and Women’s Writing. CR: The New Centennial Review 1 November 2020; 20 (3): 153–178. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/crnewcentrevi.20.3.0153 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressCR: The New Centennial Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © Michigan State University Board of Trustees Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

“Split by the Moonlight”: Beethoven and the Racial Sublime in African American Literature

Abstract As Nathan Waddell has recently argued of the literary modernists whose aesthetic incorporation of the Beethovenian legend complicates the dominant view of modernism as an antitraditionalist enterprise, Ludwig van Beethoven’s music has in fact left a more significant and complicated mark on African American literature relating to the sublime properties of his musical aesthetic than has previously been recognized. As a point of departure, I apply Michael J. Shapiro’s definition of the racial sublime as a confrontation with the “still vast oppressive structure that imperils black lives” to the setting of twentieth-century African American literature, where Beethoven’s Romantic sublime often stands in for the racial sublime. This transference, I argue, is not an expression of the artist’s repressed instinctual conflict, the mere sublimation of their devotion to “white” culture and the cult of genius, as Amiri Baraka once suggested. Rather, Beethoven’s music formed a persistent and powerful political allegory of the racial sublime for many prominent twentieth-century authors in their literary works, where the sublime constitutes a sublimation of direct forms of power into a range of aesthetic experiences. This can be observed in the Beethovenian ekphrasis featured in prose works by James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison—four writers whose works have also been considered indebted to blues and jazz musical influences and who approach the racial sublime not through language but by appealing to music’s nonsignifying suggestiveness, in order to capture the intensities that radiate out of these encounters. As this article reveals, their allegorical uses for Beethoven are not unitary. The forcefield of the racial sublime is registered allegorically through the performative sublime of Sonata “Pathétique” in Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912); the sublime melancholy of the “Moonlight” Sonata in Hughes’s tragic short story “Home” (1934); the spiritual sublime of Beethoven’s piano concerti and the Ninth Symphony in Baldwin’s short story “Previous Condition” (1948); and the heroic sublime of the Fifth Symphony in Ellison’s bildungsroman Invisible Man (1952).

Influenza and Embodied Sociality in Early Twentieth-Century American Literature

AbstractThis article reads two early twentieth-century American novels, William Maxwell’s They Came Like Swallows (1937) and Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939), in relation to the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918–19 and the history of public health. Beyond serving as a literary record of “America’s forgotten pandemic,” it interprets these novels as experiments in what I term “embodied sociality”: a biocultural model of social life encompassing both the abstract, symbolic dimensions of community belonging and the concrete, biological contours of collective living made visible through the spread of infectious disease. I argue that Swallows and Pale Horse challenge the logic of “modern health citizenship,” which prioritized personal hygiene measures to prevent the spread of influenza through a community, that was promoted in turn-of-the-century public health efforts. Instead, these novels destabilize perceptions of the body as a discrete and potentially impermeable entity, revealing how to belong to a community is to be susceptible to the unseen agents of disease that move between bodies in close proximity, as well as to be, albeit unwittingly, a potential carrier of disease. Attending to embodied sociality as made visible by the flu, these novels necessitate a new way of writing pandemic—one that blends the narrative conventions of plague writing and autopathography. In so doing, I contend, Pale Horse and Swallows invite us to reimagine embodiment and community belonging by holding the local and global, personal and political, individual and collective dimensions of pandemic together.When we recognize pandemic as simultaneously individual and communal, the boundaries that differentiate proximal bodies from one another and from a collective social body blur. And this knowledge, in turn, transforms the way we write pandemic.

Review: Culinary Poetics and Edible Images in Twentieth-Century American Literature

Review: Culinary Poetics and Edible Images in Twentieth-Century American Literature

Circulating Queerness: Before the Gay and Lesbian Novel by Natasha Hurley

Reviewed by: Circulating Queerness: Before the Gay and Lesbian Novel by Natasha Hurley Jessica Floyd Natasha Hurley Circulating Queerness: Before the Gay and Lesbian Novel Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2018. xviii + 320 pp. Moby-Dick begins with the echoing and enduring statement "Call me Ishmael," which identifies the narrator and commands readers to consider his identity immediately. The opening imperative sets the stage for learning the character's inner workings, especially as he interacts with everything around him, and demands that the reader attend to a complex interiority as it is juxtaposed against the raging tides of the sea. In Circulating Queerness: Before the Gay and Lesbian Novel, Natasha Hurley considers one of Melville's earlier novels, Typee, along with other late nineteenth and early twentieth-century American novels, short stories like Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's "A New England Nun," letters like those passed between Charles Warren Stoddard and Walt Whitman, and the literary collection of Stoddard himself, as sites of world-making and identity circulation, especially gay and lesbian identities, with a focus on the same inner voice and circular relationship between self and world crystallized in the scene of Ishmael's call. Her argument is predicated on the idea that these cultural objects are the site of an emergent queer identity: that they capture a synergy between articulating a sense of self and actively shaping identity for the outside world. The key term throughout her analysis is circulation, and she threads this circularity both inside and outside the fictive worlds investigated. Circulation is paramount to her argument, which is that if we look closely at circulation, whether how narratives represent it or how texts are passed around, we can chart a slow emergence of queer identities that announce themselves as forcefully as Ishmael. Hurley's exacting inquiry provides an opportunity to contemplate the shaping of identity differently, to find the pulse of human interiority in circuits that hum across the narratives of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century American literature, eventually connecting together to make way for later, more concrete articulations of identity and personhood. Circulating Queerness challenges scholars "to queer the very ways we read texts" (xv) and produces a critical argument that contains the promise to [End Page 97] impact multiple fields, including Melville studies, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American studies, potentially early modern British and American literary research, and gender and sexuality studies. The book "track[s] the force of literary objects and representations as accumulated, interactive, side-by-side, engagements of texts with other texts that make it possible to conceive of queer subjectivity itself" (xi). Hurley attends to literature that has historically been earmarked as queer and argues that if scholars place such works along a continuum, a steady materializing of immanent queer identities comes into focus. Unlike other scholars who have explored queer identities in literature, she decided that "rather than take as my object of study the figure of the subject of sexuality as a matter of textual representation," she would "examine instead the textual conditions of its possibility" (xi). Queer lives develop in literature through a constant process of relation that is sometimes only historical and situational but is, just as often, born of what she presents as a subtle process of circulation both within and outside of cultural material that delivers it into contemporary consciousness. For Hurley, contemporary thought visits its theoretical frameworks onto literature but is also influenced by the worlds generated through literature. She ventures that "the gay and lesbian novel emerges at the intersection of two different, yet connected, processes of cultural development: sexual type evolution and the emergence of a subgenre for the novel" (14). She points to an embryonic queer identity, predicated on circulation, found in narrators and characters attempting to capture complex interiorities at odds with the world around them and, too, to novels in which queer identities and characters come to acquire queerness. Queer identities are those that are forever in the process of being shaped through relationships internal and external. Each chapter calls attention to particular novels, characters, or collectors. Typee, the archival papers of Stoddard, literature about the lives of old maids, The Bostonians, and the writings...

The Pragmatist Turn: Religion, the Enlightenment, and the Formation of American Literature

The Pragmatist Turn: Religion, the Enlightenment, and the Formation of American Literature

Rethinking the Socialist Voice: Jack London and “The Dignity of Dollars”

The writings of Jack London offer a nuanced reading and opportunities for dynamic interpretation. He is one of the most prolific and debated writers of the twentieth century American literature. The “rags to riches” writer, whose early life was one of struggle and loss; he was very much influenced by the disparity in the social structure. Though he himself declared in an interview that he writes for money and caters to the demand of the market, in another place he was very displeased at the caging and categorizing that was often done by critics. He emphasized that an approach to his writings should be attempted towards bringing out the “motif under the motif” and not just labelling him. One such categorizing is his adherence to socialism. The purpose of this paper is to go beyond the theoretical premise of socialism and tend to unearth the contestations to the socialist ideals through his non fictional writing “The Dignity of Dollars”. An effort has been made to use the premise of Michel Foucault to understand the power relations in society and how Jack London even years before conformed to it.

Violence, Storm, and the South in Beyoncé’s Lemonade

Kyoko Shoji Hearn is an Associate Professor at Kanazawa University in Japan where she focuses on twentieth and twenty-first century American literature and culture with a special emphasis on southe...

Between Jew and Nature: Tracing Jewish Ethics in the Ecological Imagination of Bernard Malamud’sDubin’s Lives

ABSTRACTThe idea that Jews are “ecophobes” is a favorite shtick of American comedy. But does it reflect the truth? This article offers an alternative reading of the Jewish cultural production in twentieth-century American literature that goes beyond the stereotypical image of the “unnatural Jew.” Principally focused on Bernard Malamud’s novel Dubin’s Lives, this article frames Malamud’s work within the context of post-war environmental thought, American Jewish literature, and Jewish environment ethics. I hope to provide an alternative vision of modern American Jewish imagination and its relation to the nonhuman environment. I argue that this relation takes shape in Jewish culture due in part to its historical context: a context marked by Diaspora and assimilation. I enlist Emmanuel Lévinas’s ethics of asymmetry and Hans Jonas’s ontological ethics to show how Judaism and Jewish philosophy can be an ally in the creation or expansion of contemporary environmental ethics. Textual or performative Jews, to whom American literature and humor have accustomed us, are finally “two with Nature” (as Woody Allen says) not because they are Jewish but, perhaps, because they are not “Jewish” enough.